On the Indigeneity of Plants

The world, for humans today, is a sea of anxiety which
ultimately only closer connection to nature can quell. Whether you
call it karma, thermodynamics, homeostasis, sustainability, or just plain common
sense, doesn't really matter. What matters is that our own human nature
is intimately interconnected with the nature of our local
and global environment. For about 4 million years, humans evolve with
a very close relationship between inner consciousness and the rhythm, riches
and dangers of nature. As the human-nature connection has transformed
and traditional knowledge about the connections lost, modern human society
has spiraled out of control.

I have had persistent visions
over the years of the
streets of civilization being eventually overgrown with plants hundreds of
years from now. Perhaps we should re-read John Christopher’s “Day of
the Triffids” and “Death of Grass”, just to remind ourselves again of the
possible futures for man and plant together - at least if we continue to get it
wrong. The plants were here long
before us and will be here long after us. They have an
enviable wisdom and patience as the original
inhabitants, the first forms of life, who have seen it all and worked
out how to maintain and transform themselves through evolution. Plants are more indigenous
than any human being. And, above all, if we as humans want to survive
as a species, we need to nurture our
relationship with plants (upon which we are totally dependent for survival,
whether nutritionally, economically, or psychologically).

On the Suppression of Psychoactive Plants

Human beings have a long history of being awful to one
another, to animals, and to plants. Whether its slavery, wars,
hunting, farming, clearing forests, or banning
the growth and use of plants such as Poppy,
Cannabis Sativa and
Salvia Divinorum (the three illegal plants in Australia). This is akin to
jailing and massacring indigenous people. To "lock away" certain
plants from access to society is to cut off our nose to spite our face.
Clearly many people want to explore their relationship with such plants, and
continue to do so illegally. People who wish to explore their
relationship with plants are marginalized and by law punishable variously
through death, jail or fine. Yet the viewpoint that such plants are
evil and damaging is largely propaganda.

Instead, we need to create places on earth where people,
animals, and plants can exist in freedom, unity, and harmony. All
plants in indigenous life had uses and applications, whether for their
strength, nutrition, medicinal or psychoactive properties. Plants
were used wisely and effectively. The problem is that we've largely
lost the positive cultures into which the use of such plants were embedded. Our culture, if we are to survive, needs to
rediscover a more holistic relationship
nature, starting with plants, and one in we understand plants not only for their
physical properties (e.g., aesthetics of flowers, wood for building), medicinally (e.g., for healing), but also
psychologically (e.g., for exploring consciousness). I imagine a place
in which all plants
belong and humans have positive relationships for exploration of mutual power and
potential.

Personal, Indigenous Farming of
Psychoactive Plants

We need to develop an intimate relationship
with plants throughout their life cycle, whatever one's form of plant usage
- vegetables, fruit, trees for wood, and plants for medical and
psychological uses.
Ultimately, we all consume and use many plants, although these days we grow
very few ourselves. The disconnection from growing for one's consumption,
whether plant or animal, is a dangerous trait of industrial societies.
It opens up an experiential gap which allows for poor decisions to made
about the management of the natural environment.

Ironically, due to the illegal nature of psychoactive plants, personal
farming of psychoactive is now becoming more common, because of the market
scarcity and unpredictability. This also happened during the period of alcohol prohibition in
the United States. People rediscovered how to brew alcohol themselves. By
growing for one's own needs, one becomes an indigenous person, tending to
the earth and cooperating with it to provide for one's own needs. Each
person should aim to grow through their lifetime at least the amount of
food, wood, and medical/psychological plants as he/she
consumes. It is a simple necessity for collective survival, but we
have become divorced from understanding and tending to the growth of plants,
although we continue happy to consume to the detriment of future sustainability.

It is important to understand that where there is genuine, mature,
sustainable exploration of the psychoactive properties of plants, the
user will generally evolve to having a relationship with
the whole lifecycle of the plant, and not simply
the gratuitous point of consumption. We must be careful not
to simply consume a plant without respect and understanding about how it grows, where it comes from,
and the nature of its uses and effects.

Each plant species has properties in common with its genetic lineage
that can be explored, mapped and understood. By engaging in
an evolving relationship with plants, we discover that we can become so much more
with so much less. By taking personal responsibility for contributing
as much as we consume, we live indigenously and 'righteously'.
Psychoactive plants have an important place in helping human society to
evolve and mature. In the future psychoactive plants will have their
place one way or another, hopefully used in
far more rich, mature and safe ways than that reckless
recreational usage of powerful chemicals and draconian, fear-based government
prohibitive policies.

Intimate knowledge of psychoactive plants was
traditionally held by shamans -- and the role of shamans, though no longer
central in Western communities, is still vital. Shamans acquired and developed
holistic knowledge about access to altered states of consciousness.
Then the shaman helped society to access states of consciousness for their own
benefit, whether for healing, celebration, vision-searching, problem
solving, and so on. The shaman developed, among things, intimate knowledge of the plant’s life cycles and plant's
personalities (aka plant-ality). Indigenous relationships with plants
are essential for a sustainable society. It is not well understood today
that for effective use of psychoactive plants, one should either be either
under the guidance of a shaman or at least be actively pursuing a holistic
relationship with the full cycle of each plants.